Category: music

“The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (RLPO) was not misleading in its claim to be the ‘oldest surviving professional symphony orchestra’, it has been ruled.” Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority “ruled the orchestra had shown ‘documentary evidence’ to prove the claim.”

“People began lining up at 4 a.m. late last month to buy $8 tickets, which quickly sold out for the Los Angeles Philharmonic concerts. They were limited to four a person, but scalpers were said to have scooped up many.”

“The only Grammy telecast with more viewers was in 1984, when 43.8 million tuned in. That was the year that Michael Jackson won a record eight Grammys. Last year’s show attracted 26.7 million viewers.”

More than 100,000 albums and nearly 900,000 individual tracks sold in a little over 24 hours.

The company normally uses the Louisville Orchestra in the pit, but that financially troubled organization is still in a longstanding contract dispute with its musicians. So, for its season-closing production of The Merry Widow this weekend, Kentucky Opera assembled a non-union pit band from local community orchestras – whereupon company music director Joseph Mechavich backed out.

When Kentucky Opera music director Jospeh Mechavich withdrew from the company’s Merry Widow following the hiring of non-union orchestra musicians, he was suddenly available for this weekend. As it happens, the conductor for Saturday’s West Coast premiere of Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick at San Diego Opera fell ill; Mechavich had conducted that very score last month in Calgary, so he stepped right up.

“An Edward Elgar manuscript dating back nearly 90 years has been discovered in a council building in Leicestershire. Staff found the musical score while clearing out a storage room at Charnwood Borough Council’s headquarters in Loughborough.”

“George Gershwin’s part will be played by a Yamaha Disklavier PRO – a kind of super-computer player piano mechanism inside a classic, nine-foot concert grand. It’s essentially a “playback” instrument; what’s truly special here is what will guide the Disklavier: the Zenph Sound Innovations software that meticulously replicates a musician’s performance as computer data.”

The 60-year-old cellist, “who has been multitasking of late in ventures with his wife, the pianist Wu Han – as co-artistic director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center … and Music@Menlo in California, and as co-producer of the record label ArtistLed – is leaving to pursue ‘his personal artistic endeavors’.”

Based on existing neuropsychology studies and an analysis of the Grammy-winning song, it seems that the answer involves crescendos, appoggiaturas, and dopamine.